Frances Wilson applauds a moving historical account of the English way of
love.

Between the years of 1930 and 1970, when someone whispered “I love you”, what exactly were they saying? It depends on whether they were male or female – “the word love”, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, “has by no means the same sense for both sexes” – but also on whether they were declaring themselves before or after 1955. In the first half of the 20th century, Claire Langhamer explains in this engrossing book, when marriage was harder to avoid and divorce was harder to obtain, love and sex constituted separate spheres. To “love” your spouse meant to look after them rather than to expect sexual intimacy with them, but by the second half of the century the term suggested something more complex and less certain. As Prince Charles put it when asked whether he was in love with Lady Diana Spencer, “whatever love means”.

The English in Love opens, however, with a different royal romance: Princess Margaret’s announcement in 1955 that she “had decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend”. Twenty years earlier, Edward VIII had made the opposite decision when he told the nation that he could not continue as king “without the help and support of the woman I love”. One way of reading the difference between the two choices is to say that men are romantic and women are self-controlled, but there were periods during the century when the opposite was believed to be the case.

The response to Princess Margaret’s decision to put duty before desire, Langhamer argues, revealed a country at the “point of emotional transition”. While both the Daily Mail and a weekly anarchist magazine took pity on the princess, one housewife, speaking for a different section of the nation, held that she had done the right thing because “a woman who marries out of her own circle is generally more lonely and unhappy than a man”.

The premise of The English in Love is that “love has a history”, and in the middle of the last century – the period on which Langhamer focuses – the emotion experienced a quiet and very English “revolution”. In the station waiting-room of Brief Encounter in 1945, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard chose self-restraint over self-fulfillment, but by the time the Beatles split up the public vote would be for passion over pragmatism when choosing a partner. Romance had won the day, but at a cost. Passionate love, it seems, is no basis for a marriage.

Claire Langhamer, a historian at Sussex University, has grounded her research on women’s magazines, advice offered in problem pages, the Royal Commission Report on Marriage and Divorce and, overwhelmingly, the Mass-Observation Archive held at Sussex University library. Mass-Observation was one of the great ideas of the 20th century: between 1937 and the mid-Fifties, researchers asked ordinary people questions such as “if you are married, engaged or in love, state the part played in this situation by the consideration of class”. The result is an extraordinarily intimate record of a particular historical moment. “Marriage to my husband has been a continual drag-down,” responded one woman. “I have lived like a hermit to avoid letting people see him. Have not dared to make friends with interesting or cultured people because he will smoke cheap tobacco, murder the King’s English and behave like a fool.”

Participants were also invited to document their emotions and experiences in the form of diaries. One of the most poignant extracted here is an account of Christmas Day, 1940, given by diarist number 5,165, a soldier on leave: “When we had had tea, and eaten more cakes than we should, we went to bed and spent two hours, very close in each other’s arms and very warm. We got up at half-past eight and washed. I shaved, cleaned my buttons, and caught the last bus to the depot… when I kissed my darling good night I felt I had never spent a happier Christmas.”

An earlier moment, from 1931, is a letter sent to Mrs Worth, agony aunt of Modern Marriage magazine. The correspondent explained that he was “engaged to a distractingly pretty girl” who was none the less lazy, undomestic and unpleasant to her mother and sisters. “If you marry her,” Mrs Worth replied, “you will risk terrible unhappiness. She will enslave you with her prettiness and torture you by her selfishness and emptiness.” Did he take Mrs Worth’s good advice? The answer is probably not: Langhamer shows that men consistently confused lust with love. Women, on the other hand, were assumed to be desire-free zones. As another agony aunt patiently explained, we experience “practically no sexual excitement” at the “sight of a man’s body”.

Reading The English in Love is like watching a flickering black-and-white home movie. The cacophony of voices pull us back to the moment when seamed stockings gave way to miniskirts and the golden age of marriage gave way to spiralling divorce. Langhamer ends this vivid account of the revolution in the human heart by returning to Mass-Observation diarist 5,165, enjoying leave with his wife in 1942. They shared a bath, went early to bed, and talked about things “that are really worth while… This is so rare a feeling in the army, where almost every single thought is divorced from action, and when every active thought is of going home”. Now that’s love, actually.